Siddharth Mohan Roy | Admissions Consultant
In Part 1, I traced the most common mistakes students make when building their Singapore medical school applications: grades falling short, UCAT being deprioritised, and personal statements that repeat rather than reveal. Now I want to focus on what happens next. The student who got it right on paper: good grades, meaningful activities, a coherent personal statement, gets shortlisted, and then struggles to convert that into an actual offer. The interview becomes the hurdle they didn’t see coming.
Public Speaking: The Skill Nobody Prepared For
This is a hard truth, and I say it with genuine care for the students I work with: many of them simply never learned how to speak about themselves out loud. They have the substance. They just never practised putting it into words.
I have sat across from students with over 50 hours of volunteering at NKF, months spent at MINDS, shifts at IMH, St Luke’s, or Assisi Hospice, and when I ask them to tell me about a moment that stood out, they go blank. They remember that they went. They cannot always tell me what happened when they were there.
This is increasingly common, and it’s partly a numbers problem. The pool of students volunteering at these organisations grows every year, and interviewers are hearing the same names, the same places, the same broad descriptions over and over again: “I volunteered at NKF and learned about patient care” tells an interviewer very little. What they’re listening for is something specific: a conversation you had with a patient, a moment that made you uncomfortable and how you sat with that, something significant that shifted the way you thought about healthcare or about people.
Let me be clear – I am not asking you to manufacture emotional moments that didn’t happen. The nuance is already there in your experience. The work is learning to surface it. This is why, from the very beginning of my work with students, I ask them to reflect on their experiences and write anecdotes: not just summaries, but actual moments. What were you doing in that befriending session? What did the person say to you? What did you say back? What were you thinking? This kind of granular reflection is what separates a candidate who has done the hours from one who has genuinely absorbed them.
I also use a structured tracker with many of my students. Both NUS and NTU are relatively transparent about the competencies they are assessing in their interviews. That is useful information, and you should treat it as such. Map your experiences to what they are looking for, prepare specific anecdotes for each area, and be strategic about it. The interview is a structured assessment, and the students who do well are usually the ones who have prepared with that in mind.
The Nerves
Nerves show up at every stage: when you’re submitting the application and second-guessing every word, when the interview invitation arrives, and suddenly it feels very real, in the days of preparation leading up to it, the moment you walk into the room, and in the hours after, when you’re replaying every answer in your head.
No mentor can make the nerves disappear. What good preparation or mentoring can do is help you manage them so they don’t manage you. The practical work matters more than students expect. Controlled breathing before and during the interview can meaningfully lower your stress response. Learning how to hold eye contact without it feeling like a staring contest takes practice. Noticing when your hands start to shake, or your voice starts to rush, and having a simple anchor to bring yourself back, these are learnable skills. They come from rehearsing in conditions that approximate the real thing, not from reading about them.
Filler Words: Uhms, Ahs, and Likes
Filler words are a natural part of speech. Nobody speaks without them entirely. But in an interview setting, a heavy reliance on “uhm”, “ands”, “ah”, and “like” can work against you. It can make you sound uncertain even when your answer is strong, and it signals to the interviewer that you’re still searching rather than speaking from a place of genuine confidence. The fix is not to obsess over eliminating every filler word. It’s to slow down. Most filler words appear when we rush to fill silence. Letting yourself pause, taking a breath before answering, gives your thinking a moment to catch up with your speaking. A deliberate pause reads as composure. A string of fillers reads as nerves.
The “This Station Looks Easy” Trap
One of the more common mistakes I see heading into interview season is students mentally ranking their stations and deciding in advance which ones need serious preparation and which ones they can wing.
Roleplays in particular tend to get underestimated. Students assume that because there’s no medical knowledge being tested, there’s nothing to prepare. But the roleplay station is precisely where your soft skills are on full display: how you listen, how you respond under pressure, whether you can hold space for someone without rushing to fix things, and how you handle a scenario that takes an unexpected turn. We forget that these are not instinctive for most people! They require practice!
The group station at NUS gets similarly dismissed. The thinking goes: “It’s just a group discussion, I’ll figure it out when I’m there.” The problem is that most of us have blind spots about how we come across in group settings. You might not realise you tend to speak over others, or that you go quiet when someone more assertive takes over, or that your body language closes off when you disagree. These things matter, and you can only catch them if someone is watching you and giving you honest feedback before the real thing. Tldr: Know what’s coming: roleplays, scenarios, a personal station, potentially a medical knowledge component, and for NUS, both individual and group stations. Treat each one seriously.
You Can’t Predict Everything, and That’s Fine
Some students walk out of their interview feeling rattled because something came up that they hadn’t prepared for. A question they hadn’t seen before, a scenario that went in a direction they didn’t expect, a topic that fell just outside what they had covered.
Here is the honest truth: you cannot prepare for every possible thing that could come up. The interview will always have something that surprises you. That is partly by design. What the interviewers want to see in those moments is not perfect knowledge. They want to see how you think when you don’t have a ready answer. They want to see whether you can stay calm, reason through something unfamiliar, and engage with it honestly rather than deflect or freeze. My ultimate advice: adaptability is not a backup quality for when preparation runs out. It is itself something they are assessing. The students who handle the unexpected well are usually the ones who went in with genuine curiosity rather than a script, who were prepared enough to feel secure but flexible enough not to crumble when things deviated from the plan.
Final Thoughts
As the next cycle approaches, regardless of where you are in your application journey, I hope reading about these patterns helps you move forward with a little more awareness. The mistakes I’ve written about are not rare or unusual. They are things smart and hardworking students repeat every single year, often without realising it until they’re already past the point where it matters.
Applications are daunting. There is no getting around that. A document, a score, a sixty-minute interview: it can feel like your entire future is being weighed on someone else’s scale. But there is more in your control than it sometimes feels like. The grades you build now, the experiences you actually reflect on, the reading habit you start this week, the mock interview you do even when you feel ready enough: these are all choices you get to make.
The students I’ve seen do well are the ones who stayed honest with themselves, prepared with intention, and walked into the process with their eyes open. That is entirely within your reach.
Good luck with the cycle ahead.
